The cognitive status, form and distribution of referring expressions in ASL and English narratives

This study examines the distribution of referring forms in American Sign Language (ASL). The theoretical framework for the study is the Givenness Hierarchy (Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski, 1993), an implicational scale of six cognitive statuses signaled by different linguistic forms. The Givenness Hierarchy has proven to be adequate for describing the appropriate use of pronouns and determiners in a number of spoken languages. The purpose of the present study is to test its adequacy in describing the use of referring forms in a visual-gestural language, American Sign Language (ASL).; To elicit data for this study, narrative retellings of the line-drawing book, The Frog Story, were recorded on digital videotape, 8 by native ASL signers and 8 by native English speakers. The videotapes were transcribed and the referring forms were coded according to the highest status met by each form. Distribution of the ASL forms was analyzed and then compared to the distribution of forms in the English data.; The ASL narratives patterned like the English narratives in several ways, including the status required for appropriate use of zero and demonstrative pronouns; infrequent use of the form that signals the status 'familiar'; and restriction of the form that signals 'type identifiable' to entities that are at most referential.; The ASL and English narratives patterned differently in that there were fewer referents whose highest status was 'uniquely identifiable' or 'activated' in the ASL narratives. However, forms that can only be used appropriately when the referent is 'in focus' were used much more frequently in ASL. The ASL narrators disfavored overt pronouns and nouns to refer to these entities and instead used other devices, based on visual-gestural resources of ASL, such as simultaneous reference to two entities; incremental changes in referring forms and change of status as a referent is held or manipulated.; The results show that the principles of the Givenness Hierarchy framework are applicable in describing referring forms in a signed language. They also demonstrate how modality influences the form and distribution of referring expressions.